All of us agree that we should simplify and improve laws if experience and operation clearly demonstrate the need.  For instance, all of us want better provision for our older people under our social security legislation.  For the medically needy we must provide better care.

Most of us agree that for the sake of employer and employee alike we must find ways to end factional labor strife and employer-employee disputes.

Most of us recognize that none of these tools can be put to maximum effectiveness unless the executive processes of government are revamped—­reorganized, if you will—­into more effective combination.  And even after such reorganization it will take time to develop administrative personnel and experience in order to use our new tools with a minimum of mistakes.  The Congress, of course, needs no further information on this.

With this exception of legislation to provide greater government efficiency, and with the exception of legislation to ameliorate our railroad and other transportation problems, the past three Congresses have met in part or in whole the pressing needs of the new order of things.

We have now passed the period of internal conflict in the launching of our program of social reform.  Our full energies may now be released to invigorate the processes of recovery in order to preserve our reforms, and to give every man and woman who wants to work a real job at a living wage.

But time is of paramount importance.  The deadline of danger from within and from without is not within our control.  The hour-glass may be in the hands of other nations.  Our own hour-glass tells us that we are off on a race to make democracy work, so that we may be efficient in peace and therefore secure in national defense.

This time element forces us to still greater efforts to attain the full employment of our labor and our capital.

The first duty of our statesmanship is to bring capital and man-power together.

Dictatorships do this by main force.  By using main force they apparently succeed at it—­for the moment.  However we abhor their methods, we are compelled to admit that they have obtained substantial utilization of all their material and human resources.  Like it or not, they have solved, for a time at least, the problem of idle men and idle capital.  Can we compete with them by boldly seeking methods of putting idle men and idle capital together and, at the same time, remain within our American way of life, within the Bill of Rights, and within the bounds of what is, from our point of view, civilization itself?

We suffer from a great unemployment of capital.  Many people have the idea that as a nation we are overburdened with debt and are spending more than we can afford.  That is not so.  Despite our Federal Government expenditures the entire debt of our national economic system, public and private together, is no larger today than it was in 1929, and the interest thereon is far less than it was in 1929.